Текст книги "Dark Ararat"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

“It’s just the numbers,” Ike told her. “There must be thousands. No birds, though. Squirrels and monkeys and whistling lizards. Great lungs, though. Can we assume that they’re marking territories and summoning mates, do you think, or should we be bending our minds to wonder what otherfunctions that kind of caterwauling might serve?”

Nobody bothered to answer that, or to remind the speaker that what he really meant was squirrel– and monkey– analogues.

“The biodiversity might be limited by comparison with home,” Lynn observed, “but there are plenty of critters out there. Maybe we ought to moor for a spell and take a look. The forest’s quite different hereabouts, nothing like the hills around the ruins.”

“Better to do it on the way back,” Ike said. “We came to take a look at the vitreous grasslands. They’re the great unknown, the ultimate Tyrian wilderness.”

The urgent phase of the chorus faded soon enough, although it never dissolved into silence. Almost as soon as the stars came out in force the boat bumped something, and then bumped it again. The impacts were slight but distinctly tangible. Matthew’s first thought was that they were nudging dangerous underwater rocks, but it only required a glance to inform him that the river was easily wide enough to allow the AI to steer a course through any such hazard. Whatever was bumping Voconiawas moving under its own power to create the collisions, and it had to be at least as big as a human, if not bigger.

“We need a picture,” Ike was quick to say. “I’ll feed the AI’s visuals through to the big screen.”

Matthew and the two women returned immediately to the cabin, but the results were disappointing. There were no more bumps, and the recorded images were worthless. The AI had the means to compensate for near-darkness, but not for the turbidity of the water. They could see that somethinghad thumped the boat repeatedly, but whether it was merely a big eel-analogue or something less familiar remained frustratingly unclear.

“Here be mermaids,” Matthew murmured.

“Or maybe manatees,” Dulcie said, drily. “ Genuineexotics.”

Matthew knew what she meant. Manatees had been extinct before he was born, along with Steller’s sea cow and the dugong, and their DNA was unbanked. Humans would never see their like again—but mermaids, being safely imaginary, would always be present in the chimerical imagination. On the other hand, this was Tyre, where chimerization was built into the picture at the most fundamental level, even though the vast majority of individuals didn’t seem to be exhibiting it at the moment of their observation. If there were mermaids anywhere, this was the kind of place in which one might expect to find them.

“It was big,” Ike reported. “The AI estimates not much less than half a ton. That’s reallybig. There’s nothing like that around the base. I bet there’ll be even bigger ones further downstream, and more of them. We’ll catch up with them tomorrow. It’s only a matter of time.”

“It’s about time we found some sizable grazers,” Matthew opined. “Dense forests always favor pygmies, but rivers and their floodplains usually have far more elbowroom. There used to be hippos in Earthly rivers and elephants on plains, until people crowded them out. Even if there are humanoids lurking in the long grass of the glass savannah, they surely can’t be so numerous that they’ve driven the big herbivores to extinction. If they were that effective, we’d have found proof of their existence easily enough.”

“They couldn’t have driven the big herbivores to extinction recently,” Dulcie put in, by way of correction. “This is an oldworld. What would the biodiversity of Earth have been like a billion years hence, if humans had never invented genetic engineering?”

“It isn’t coming back,” Lynn observed. “We must have passed through its stamping ground. But there’ll be others.”

“They can’t do us any damage,” Ike said. “They won’t even wake us up, unless they can stay close enough to start chewing up the biomotor outlets.”

“Is that possible?” Matthew asked, suddenly realizing that there might be a downside to Voconia’s employment of organic structural materials and an artificial metabolism that used lightly converted local produce as fuel.

“No, it’s not,” Lynn assured him. “The AI defenses can take care of anything that conspicuous. There’s no need for anyone to sit in the stern with Rand’s gun.”

Matthew, knowing that big grazers usually congregated in herds, was not entirely convinced by this reassurance, but he was prepared to let it go for the time being. There might well be bigger animals in the lower part of the watercourse, where its progress became ever more leisurely as it meandered patiently toward the distant ocean, but Voconiawas not bound for the sea. Her first mooring would be in the more active waters immediately below the cataract, and it would be from there that their first expedition inland would be mounted. Given that the “grasslands” grew so tall as to be virtual forests, they would be more likely to be inhabited by pygmies than giants—always provided, of course, that the logic that pertained on Earth was reproducible here.

The evening meal’s main course was a surprisingly accurate imitation of Earthly ravioli. Matthew wondered at first whether his IT had responded to his earlier dislike to filter out some of the less pleasant taste sensations from the Tyrian manna, but he decided on closer examination that his positive reaction was partly a matter of gradual acclimatization and partly a matter of the skill with which the programmer—Dulcie—had concocted a masking sauce.

“Congratulations,” he said to her, when they were done. “I think you’ve cracked the problem. What this colony needs more than anything else, at this stage of its history, is a Brillat-Savarin. At the end of the day, there’s nothing like a pleasant taste to create a sense of welcome. Hopecould do with a good chef or two—soon put an end to all that revolutionary nonsense.”

“I’m an anthropologist,” she reminded him. “Cooking is the foundation stone of all human culture, the first of the two primary biotechnologies. Unfortunately, that might be exactly why my talents will be wasted if we do make contact with intelligent aborigines. Whatever the fundamental pillars supporting theircultures are, they can’t include cooking. Clothing maybe, but not cooking.”

“I’d have thought that the probable absence of sex was a far more radical alienation,” Lynn Gwyer put in, trying to turn the joke into something more serious. “People get a little carried away with this primary biotechnology stuff, in my opinion. The real foundations of human society lie in parental strategies for the care and protection of children. Families, marriage ceremonies, incest taboos: the whole business of the determination and regulation of sexual relationships. Take away that—as we may have to—and the fact that they don’t cookbegins to seem utterly trivial.”

Matthew expected Dulcie to dismiss the objection with a gentle reminder that she had not been serious, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, Dulcie said, with sudden deadly earnest: “You’re wrong, Lynn. That’s nature, not culture. All animals regulate their sexual relationships according to their sociobiology, and that kind of regulation is mostly hardwired. What culture adds to it is ritual dressing, and all ritual is based in primal technology. In humans, culture takes over from nature at the Promethean moment when fire ceases to be a natural phenomenon and comes under technical and cultural control.”

If anything, the anthropologist’s intensity increased as she continued: “Matthew’s right—probably righter than he imagines. What we need before we can feel at home here is better cooks, and it might well prove that the best route to a recovery of the crew’s loyalty to the mission is through their stomachs. And what we’ll probably need if we’re ever to make common cause with the humanoids, if they exist, is a way to sit down with them, and break bread together, and share the delights of fire. At the end of the day, no matter how you ritualize it, sex divides, because that’s its nature. Cooking unites, because cooking makes relationships palatable. Sex couldn’t be the basis of human society, because it was the chief problem society had to overcome. The strategies of that problem’s solution had to begin elsewhere: in the primal biotechnologies and the rituals they facilitated.”

Lynn was taken aback momentarily, but she was quick to smile. “Fifty-eight light-years and seven centuries,” she said, amiably, “and it’s still the same old thing. Nature versus nurture, biologists versus human scientists. Makes you feel quite at home, doesn’t it? And isn’t that what we all want? To feel at home here.”

“If we can,” Ike reminded her. “Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in—but there’ll always be places where they simply won’t, no matter how hard you try. The universe might be full of them. We just don’t know.”

“True,” Matthew said. “But at least it’s us who get to knock on the door and find out. Who among us would prefer to leave the job to someone else?”

He was glad to see that none of his companions was prepared to raise her—or even his—hand in response to that invitation.

THIRTY

The cliff beside the cataract was more than thirty meters high. On the left bank, where Voconia’s motley crew had moored the boat fifty meters short of the falls, the cliff was sheer, falling away no more than a couple of degrees from the vertical. When he first stepped back onto solid ground, however, the configuration of the cliff was the least of Matthew’s concerns. He wanted to look out over the mysterious signal-blocking canopy of the “glasslands”: at the densely packed grasslike structures whose seemingly anomalous dimensions would reduce him yet again to the imaginary status of an elfin spider-rider adrift in a microcosmic wonderland.

From the cliff’s edge, alas, it was impossible to see much more than he had already seen in mute pictures collected by flying eyes. He was too high up, as yet, to be anything other than a remote observer, from whose vantage the canopy proper resembled a vast petrified ocean, littered with all manner of strange flotsam. Its true extent was undoubtedly awesome, but the Tyrian horizon seemed no less and no more distant than an Earthly horizon, and the restriction of his vision by that natural range seemed rather niggardly. The real revelation would not come, he knew, until he was down there, looking up at the canopy from within; that was the sight that Hope’s insectile flying eyes had so far been unable to capture. He was pleased to see that the fringe vegetation rimming the river and the fault extended for no more than fifty yards before mingling with the “grasses” and no more than a hundred before giving way entirely to the seeming monoculture.

The other side of the river looked more user-friendly to Matthew than the one on which they had stopped, because it had a slope so gentle that he could imagine himself stumbling down it, even with an injured right arm. If they had moored on that side, though, they would have had to carry the dismantled boat and all its cargo by hand, making trip after trip after trip. On the left bank there was plenty of space to erect a winch, from which a generous basket could be lowered on a cable to arrive on a relatively flat apron of rock beside the capacious pool into which the waters of the river tumbled.

“It’s not much of a target,” Matthew complained to Lynn Gwyer. “The water might look fairly placid on top, but that’s an illusion. The edge will be too close for comfort once you start unloading, let alone when the time comes to start putting Humpty– Voconiatogether again. The bushes down there might look unintimidating by comparison with the giant grasses but they’ll be a lot tougher at close range than they look—and the empire of the giant grasses begins less than thirty strides away. From up here the whole thing looks like a calm ocean, rippling gently in a benign wind, but it’ll look very different at close range, once we’re under the canopy.”

“It’ll be okay,” Lynn assured him. “The target’s small enough, admittedly, but the laden basket won’t swing much, and we’ll use the chain saws to clear a much bigger working space. Even if they’re the kind of bushes that the humanoids used to make tools from, the saw blades will cut through them easily enough, shattering anything that won’t shear. It’ll be a fair amount of work for a party of three, but we’ve got all day. You wouldn’t have been able to do as much as the rest of us anyway, even if you hadn’t hurt your arm. You’re not fully acclimatized yet.”

“If I had been,” Matthew muttered, “I might not have dislocated my shoulder in the first place.”

There was, as Lynn had observed, a lotof work for a party of three. Matthew did his utmost to make himself useful, and bitterly regretted it when it became painfully obvious that he was neither as strong nor as skilful as the least of his three companions. He quickly became tired, and his arm would have been agonized if his IT had not muffled the pain—but the IT was too dutiful to allow him to do further damage by insulating him from the consequences of reckless action, so it began to let the distress signals through as soon as the damaged tendons and ligaments provided it with evidence of further strain. Long before midday, therefore, Matthew was relegated to the humblest task available: working the electric motor that controlled the winch. Ike, Lynn, and Dulcie did the lion’s share of the unloading, then carried the bulk of the cargo to the cliff’s edge. Ike was the one delegated to establish a more generous bridgehead down below while Dulcie and Lynn—who knew exactly what they were doing—set about the delicate work of taking the boat itself to pieces.

“Do you want the gun?” Matthew said to Ike, when the genomicist got into the basket to make his first descent. “We don’t know what might be lurking in those bushes.”

“Well, if it’s anything that can stand up to a chain saw it’ll be big enough for you to shoot it from way up here,” Ike said. “Anyway, we don’t know what might be lurking in the bushes up here on the plateau—there’s no reason to think that the gun’s more likely to be needed down there than up here.” Ike had already donned heavy boots and protective armor, and he seemed to feel that he was well-nigh invulnerable.

Matthew stopped worrying when Ike started up the chain saw and got to work on the bushes. The saw made such a racket, and cut with such devastating effect, that any sensible creature would have taken off in the opposite direction as fast as it could run or slither. The storage space grew with astonishing rapidity, although the contrast between the bare gray rock and the purple-littered ground beyond remained as sharp as ever to the naked eye. If the bushes did have vitreous trunks and branches they shattered easily enough, and no needlelike shards shot like darts into Ike’s flesh. His booted feet trampled the foliage down with mechanical efficiency as he marched stolidly into the territory he had claimed. Various globular fruits were rushed along with the “leaves.”

As the boat slowly came apart Matthew insisted on shuttling back and forth across the fifty-meter safety margin, adding what he could to the various stacks of goods queued up by the basket, but his earlier efforts had taken their toll and he was glad to take control of the winch again once Ike signaled that he was ready to begin taking delivery of more cargo.

The manna-supplies were the last to go down before the parts of the actual boat, and it was not until then that the first accident occurred. Inevitably, it was Matthew who made the mistake, his out-of-tune reflexes and his injured arm combining to make him drop one of the heaviest boxes before he could get it into the basket. It fell in such a way that it bounced toward the edge of the cliff.

For one tantalizing moment it looked as if the box might come to a halt at the edge, but it had gathered too much momentum. To make matters worse the packaging split at the last point of impact, and the manna began to spill out as soon as the carton began its precipitate descent.

Mercifully, Ike was too far away from the edge to be at any risk—but he stood and watched with annoyance and wonder as the powdered manna became a cataract in its own right, expanding like a cloud of spray. Almost all of it landed on the carpet of crushed vegetation, dusting the purple pulp like icing on a party cake.

“It’s okay,” Lynn was quick to say. “It was only a box of biomotor-food. The converter churns out that stuff a great deal faster than produce for human consumption, and Ike’s amassed a far bigger heap of litter down there than any we ever built up in the ruins. Once we’ve got the rest of the stuff down I’ll unpack the converter and start bundling the stuff into the hopper. Boatfood’s the least of our worries right now. It would have been a hell of a lot worse if you’d dropped part of the rudder, or the AI’s brain.”

“I know,” Matthew retorted, bitterly. “I’m trying to stick to the least important items for exactly that reason. There’s an awful indignity, you know, in setting out on a pioneering voyage on a virgin world, with the possibility of meeting all manner of spectacular monsters, then rendering oneself entirely useless by falling out of bed.”

“It’s your mind we need, not your muscles,” she assured him—but Matthew was well aware that her muscles were working heroically in association with her mind, and that he would not have the slightest idea how to reassemble the boat again if that responsibility were his.

Dulcie was working even harder, with quasi-mechanical concentration and purpose. She had hardly said a word for hours, and seemed to have adapted to the requirements of long, hard labor by retreating into herself.

Matthew had no alternative but to take up his station by the lift’s control button yet again, pretending as hard as he could that there was a valuable dexterity involved in controlling the descent of the basket and guiding it to a soft landing. An AI could probably have done the job far better, but a winch was far too primitive a machine to warrant the addition of any supervising brain but a human’s.

When the disassembly process was complete, Lynn announced that she had better join Ike down below, because there would be more work to be done there from now on.

“Do you want to take the gun?” Matthew asked, for a second time, as she carefully put her armor on.

“It’s okay,” she assured him, grimacing slightly as she forced her feet into smart boots that were still rather unyielding, having never been properly worn in. “I’ll have to break out the second chain saw, so that I can clear a second platform further downriver for the reassembly. As Ike says, anything brave enough to take thaton will have to be big enough to make an easy target, even for a one-armed man shooting wrong-handed. If the worst comes to the worst, pass the gun to Dulcie. She’s good at everything.”

Dulcie did, indeed, seem to be good at everything. Having finished the skilled work she was now back to hard labor, moving the last sections of their craft into the queue for the basket, stacking them with the utmost care in such a way that the basket could be filled quickly and safely. He was impressed by the way she plugged on so relentlessly, long after Lynn had started up the second chain saw in order to begin the second stage of the clearance. He was normally content to be left alone with his thoughts, but he felt snubbed when she responded rather shortly to his various attempts to make conversation.

He wondered, vaguely, whether she was really the kind of person who became deeply absorbed in her work, impatient of distractions, or whether she was quietly inclined to put on a show. He recalled the first picture he had seen, in which she had stubbornly continued to display the battle scars she had earned in the plague war: a calculated affront to the beautiful people who formed the great majorities of the fully developed nations. He decided in the end that she was by no means innocent of showmanship, but that it was sincereshowmanship, deeply felt as well as deeply meant. It was the same judgment he would have passed on himself, and he could not resist a burst of fellow feeling in spite of what he had guessed.

In any case, there was always the infinite canopy to distract him, its multitudinous globular fruits seeming more like the rations of Tantalus with every hour that sped by. Soon, he knew, he would be able to take his own turn in the basket, descending with majestic grace to that part of Tyre that would be as new to his companions as it was to him. Even so, Matthew felt a distinct surge of relief when Dulcie was finally forced to pause while he steered the final load to a soft landing. By now, he had become a master of such elementary skills as this involved, and he was able to absorb himself in the minutiae of the load’s carefully measured fall.

When he looked up again, with a sense of satisfaction at having done the job well, Dulcie was not where he expected her to be. She was, instead, at the very lip of the chasm, standing on a spur of rock beside the water’s hectic edge. The spur projected out over the smooth-washed rocks below; it was the most precarious position available.

She seemed to be drinking in the view. Having already passed leisurely judgment on its spectacular qualities, Matthew certainly could not begrudge her the moment’s pause, and his first impulse was to follow the direction of her gaze and employ verstehenin a conscientious attempt to see it as she was seeing it.

She was, of course, well-used to the views from the crests of the hills surrounding the dead city—but those surrounding slopes had all been gentle, their undulations seeming halfhearted and indolent, and there had been so many of them that none could seem out of the ordinary. There had been slopes everywhere, cutting and confusing lines of vision in every direction. Distant horizons must have been visible, but they were always fragmentary; even when the occasional pinnacle of rock provided some relief from the blurred purple curves, it tended to be framed by nearer objects that robbed it of all grandeur. This landscape was conspicuously different. The plateau’s edge extended for kilometer after kilometer in either direction. Its neatness was interrupted here and there by arbitrary landslips and curtains of purple climbers, but the basic line was clear enough, and its convex curvature was too gentle to provide a disappointing cutoff point for a roaming eye. As for the oceanic canopy beyond, it stretched into the distance with a truly majestic sweep, extending to a horizon that was flat and sharp even on a day that was somewhat less bright than its immediate predecessors.

Matthew watched her as she lowered her eyes. Immediately below the plateau’s edge there was the ragged hem of transitional vegetation, which varied in extent from twenty to sixty meters, but he knew that it gave way soon enough to the paradoxical “savannah”: the empire of the grass-analogues that were taller and far more imperious than grass-analogues had any right to be. The structures were all alike at first glance, but even the untrained eye of an anthropologist would probably find it easy enough to pick out a dozen or so variants. Not all anthropologists would have sufficient critical spirit to challenge the crewman who had hung the “grassland” label on the territory, but Matthew was sure that Dulcie had. She would already be beginning to wonder what functions the elaborate crowns performed, given that they could not be seed heads akin to Earthly grasses of Earth. Perhaps she had heard Bernal Delgado talk about the mystery at some length, casually throwing around speculations about sophisticated sporulation mechanisms and gradual chimerical renewal in the plant kingdom. Perhaps she was taking note, as Matthew had, of the fact that the contributors to the oceanic canopy gave the impression of being collaborators rather than competitors, like members of a contentedly multicultural crowd whose collective identity casually overwhelmed the idiosyncrasies of its individual members.

There, if anywhere, she must be thinking, the descendants of the city-dwellers must be. But what kind of social life could they eke out beneath that enigmatic canopy?

Humans, as every anthropologist knew, were products of Earth’s African savannah. The crucial alliance of clever hands, keen eyes, and capacious brains had been forged by a selective regime of terrain where it paid to be tall, to hunt by day, and to develop tools for the primary biotechnologies of cooking and clothing. But none of that pertained to thismock-savannah or to thesehumanoids. The “grasses” hereabouts were far too tall to allow bipedal mammal-equivalents to peer over them. Even by day the world beneath the purple canopy would be dim, and even if the hunting were not poor, what scope could there possibly be for brain-building primary technologies? If there were no fires in the depths of that purple sea, how could there be people? How could the uncaring forces of natural selection ever have molded anything resembling people from its lumpen animal clay?

Matthew was on the brink of losing himself in such thoughts when verstehenbrought him suddenly back to earth, telling him—with some urgency—that something was wrongwith Dulcie Gherardesca’s posture.

It was not her stillness or her self-absorption that struck a warning note in his mind—she had been self-absorbed and seemingly tranquil all day—but a kind of tension that seemed to be building, little by little and not without resistance: a kind of resolve that was forming, little by little, and not untainted by doubt.

The warning note triggered a conviction, and the conviction a sudden determination.

“I’d really rather you didn’t,” he said, trying to keep his voice verysteady.

She heard him, and knew that he could only be speaking to her, but she didn’t turn around. For four long seconds it looked as if she might not deign to reply. Then she did, but still without turning to face him.

“Didn’t what?” she said.

He dared not heave a sigh of relief, even though he knew that the battle was half-won as soon as she consented to enter into a dialogue.

“Didn’t jump,” he offered, by way of unnecessary clarification. He knew that she had understood exactly what he meant. What he didn’t know was what to say next, although he knew that he had to say something, and make it good.

“You know,” he went on, after the slightest pause, “this is one of those embarrassing moments when nothing comes to mind by way of advice or reassurance but hollow clichés. I hope you’ll forgive me for sounding so utterly selfish, but the one reason that springs forth more rapidly than any other is that we really do need you. In fact, we can’t do without you. So even if the reasons for self-destruction were compelling, on a purely introspective basis, I really, reallywould rather you didn’t. Especially not now.”

“You don’t really need me,” she told him, bleakly. “There’s nothing down there, you know. Nothing useful, nothing enlightening. No answers.”

“We don’t know that,” Matthew was quick to say, having no difficulty at all in sounding sincere. “We haven’t the slightest idea what answers we might find down there, to what questions. That’s the whole point: it’s the great unknown. Even in your situation, I couldn’t even entertain the thought of coming this far and not going on.”

She didn’t have to ask what he meant by “your situation.” “Did Solari tell you when you had your little private conference?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “I guessed when I saw you with the artifacts. I knew that Vince wouldn’t have let you take material evidence away unless there was a quid pro quo. You couldn’t have confessed in so many words, of course, but I knew you must have given him to understand that you’d turn yourself in when you got back. So I know that you don’t mean it when you say there’s nothing down there. There’s everythingdown there.”

It wasn’t working, but he had to carry on. “I can’t believe you came here with the intention of not going back,” he said. “The expedition into the interior may be all that’s left to you, but isstill on, still beckoning. You mustn’t let a stray moment of doubt and despair get in the way. Please.”

“Do the others know?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Matthew said. “If they’ve guessed, they’re keeping it to themselves, just as I was. If they only suspect the truth, they’re in no hurry to exchange suspicion for certainty. Bernal expected to find something down there, didn’t he? Maybe not humanoids, but something worthwhile. Serial killer anemones. NV correlated with ER. Something to tip us off as to why this world is at one and the same time so seemingly simple and so obviously weird. We really don’t know what might be down there—and it’s certainly far too soon to despair of making progress when we haven’t even stepped across the threshold.”

Dulcie didn’t turn around, and Matthew could see that her attitude was still all wrong. That line of argument was too familiar to cut through the Gordian knot of her confusion; he needed something that could catch her attention more securely: something that could draw her out of her neurotic self-absorption; something that could surprise her. It had to be true, though. Surprise was no good in itself, and no good at all unless he could startle her with the truth—or something that could pass for the truth.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of anything that was sure to do the trick. He was tired, and his arm hurt worse than any IT-equipped man ever expected any part of him to hurt, and he had already said most of what there was to be said about the stubborn mysteries of Tyre, alias Ararat, alias humankind’s New World.

He had to get insideher skin. He had to break into the dark bubble where she had confined herself and condemned herself to death.